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Comment by drblast | Hacker News Reader

I feel like the guys in Office Space here, but I'll buy some subscriptions to Vibe if somebody can explain theoretically how you can convert a large sum of ill-gotten cryptocurrency to usable money without getting immediately caught?

From the article it sounds like the attackers' wallet id is hard-coded into the malware. I'm not familiar with monero, but aren't all transactions in cryptocurrency public and permanent?

Wouldn't it be obvious from following that who is ultimately benefiting from this?

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Monero is a privacy coin. I.e., all transactions are obfuscated by default. This makes it infeasible to follow such a money trail if the attacker is trying at all.

https://www.monero.how/how-does-monero-work-details-in-plain...

Other commenters are mentioning altcoins specifically designed for privacy, but there are ways to solve this problem with bitcoin too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency_tumbler

Monero has the "laundry" part built in.

I also don't think these criminals necessarily convert to fiat to aquire what they need/want.

When you're talking about millions of dollars of bitcoin or other altcoin stolen...well, it's hard to smoke that much crack.

But it is possible to by some crack and sell it for cash.

You can buy gold with crypto.

Millions of dollars worth? Or is it some penny-ante exchange like most Bitcoin-to-fiat services? Or will it have a strong know-your-customer rules that make it problematic for these actual criminals?

I don't see why not. Transactions worth tens of thousands of dollars are relatively common as I understand it.

>I'm not familiar with monero, but aren't all transactions in cryptocurrency public and permanent?

Not with monero (and possibly other cryptocurrencies)

That’s what they mean by it not being fungible.

>Wouldn't it be obvious from following that who is ultimately benefiting from this?

It would not, unless you could trace that address to a person.

There are coin tumbler services that supposedly "clean" the origin of whatever crypto you are using by exchanging it.

There's also Monero, which essentially has this feature baked in.

Cashing out anonymously can be difficult- localbitcoins allows you to basically conduct ad hoc exchanges of crypto with other people.

You can only get caught if there is some link to your identity. A bitcoin ATM is anonymous. Wear a hat and sunglasses if you're worried about local cameras.

google "cryptocurrency tumbling". There are grey and black market services that will take a incoming input of a bitcoin transfer, keep some percentage, commingle it with a large number of other BTC, and attempt to obfuscate the output.

They use Monero because you don't need a GPU to mine it.

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